The most recent climate stupidity suggests that American factories report their greenhouse gas emissions. As we learned from our country’s first cap-and-trade rule in California, reporting was the first step toward the required reduction of clean-burning natural gas. [some emphasis, links added]
Most factories in Southern California have closed because of that rule. It required a 75 percent reduction of natural gas over five years, the factories’ only heat source.
At our Weights and Measures gas-physics test facility in California, we tested carbon dioxide (CO2). It cools 20 degrees in less than four minutes. It cannot possibly retain heat from day to day (global warming).
We also tested our humid atmosphere, including the trace gases therein. That cools about one degree every 32 minutes or 20 degrees in roughly 11 hours.
These tests prove that no gas – not CO2, nitrogen, methane, nor even humid air – retains heat from day to day.
The scientific reality is that there is no such thing as a greenhouse gas that retains heat from day to day.
So, what is the source of the false greenhouse theory? More importantly, why is it wrong? After Al Gore arranged $22 billion annually for universities to study global warming, professors dredged up John Tyndall’s 1861 greenhouse theory to justify regulating CO2.
Keep in mind that their motive was political, not scientific, when they decided to vilify CO2 because it’s produced from the combustion of fossil fuels.
Combustion of natural gas (methane) produces CO2 and H2O, the two building blocks of photosynthesis and organic life on this planet. Burning of natural gas is harmless and most likely beneficial to the environment. I view it as recycling of Earth’s natural compost (oil).
John Tyndall’s experiment and thirty-six-page paper, written in 1861, is the much-referenced scientific study behind the greenhouse theory and global warming.
No new significant science has been added to the greenhouse theory since the paper was written. Advocates describe the theory as he described it. They even use some of Tyndall’s exact words from the paper.
John Tyndall spent two years building a large device [pictured below] that used a galvanometer indicator to measure gas temperature. The galvanometer did not quantify temperature; it measured only the movement of a gauge with gradation marks from 0 to 100.
His use of an indicator with no calibrated temperature numbers led to his false conclusion, as you will read below.
On page three of his study, Tyndall described his measuring chamber as polished brass with rock-salt lenses at each end. The subject gas would be trapped inside the brass chamber, and he produced heat that passed through both rock-salt lenses to a sensing device.
Sensing at the end of the chamber was a thermopile, which detects heat emanating through the air. It then sent a variable current to the galvanometer indicator.
He should have simply used a bi-metal temperature gauge, which had been invented about sixty years prior. It seems that since the galvanometer and the thermopile devices were new inventions, he wanted to use them.
Tyndall noted that the galvanometer’s needle wagged like a compass. This was likely caused by the thermopile, which is affected by open-atmosphere interference.
He made his first attempt to mitigate this, saying: “I therefore sought to replace the Berlin coil with a less magnetic one.” So, the galvanometer that he had purchased was no longer calibrated for accuracy.
Our company never would have given our weights and measures approval for John Tyndall’s device due to this and several other reasons.
The inaccuracy led Tyndall to report a zero temperature reading for dry air, indicating limitations in his instrument.
In reality, dry air warms substantially under solar heating, as seen in places like Death Valley, where air temperatures rise dramatically despite low humidity.
Then Tyndall lists in increasing temperatures carbonic oxide, nitrous oxide, carbonic acid, and olefiant gas. Olefiant gas is ethylene, which is the largest molecule in the group.
These are called compound molecules because they are two or more connected atoms, like CO2. Air is a mixture of unconnected atoms, mostly oxygen and nitrogen.
When his galvanometer registered 1 on a scale of 100 for air and 70.3 for another gas (pp. 7–9), Tyndall concluded the latter gas produced a temperature response 70.3 times greater than air.
At this point, he ended his testing of relative temperature effects to outline what is now the greenhouse theory: since air resulted in almost no temperature response, it was, in Tyndall’s words, “transparent to the rays of the sun,” which penetrate the air to warm the Earth’s surface.
Some of the temperature that is absorbed by the Earth is radiated back up, and a small amount of temperature is absorbed by larger compound-molecule gases (greenhouse gases in today’s jargon).
This sounds good; however, CO2 does not rise in the atmosphere. It weighs the same as propane with a specific gravity of 1.52. It seeks low points as does rainwater.
Furthermore, the inaccuracy of his instrument and measuring air at near zero temperature led to his false conclusion about a so-called greenhouse effect.
The temperature he was measuring was obviously extremely low and below the accuracy range of his instrument.
Consider that the temperature transmitted from a single candle-type flame—passing under a water-filled copper chamber, through the copper wall, through a rock-salt lens, into a brass chamber that would have leaked heat, through another rock-salt lens, and finally through open atmosphere—could have been below one degree Fahrenheit for all we know.
All the temperatures would have been within one degree of each other, not 70 times greater.
Throughout the final pages of his paper, Tyndall discussed these so-called enormous differences when, in fact, they were likely so small that accurately measured results would disprove his greenhouse theory.
Our experiments proved this to be true. The cooling times of dry air and CO2 are very nearly the same. There is little difference in heat absorption between small-molecule gases and large-molecule gases.
It is water vapor that retains the vast amount of heat, not the size of the molecule. Large-molecule (compound) gases retain heat for minutes, not days.
There is no such thing as a greenhouse gas or any gas, including vaporous air, that retains heat from day to day (global warming). Greenhouse gases are a scientific myth.
James T. Moodey owned a Weights and Measures gas-physics test facility. A condensed version of the author’s science paper, “Three Proofs Carbon Dioxide Causes No Warming in the Atmosphere — No Gas Causes Warming,” is here and in his book The Ladder Out of Poverty.
